Review: Agile Circle online collaboration project management tool

Secure online collaboration tools are a crucial part of business these days; as organisations realise the power of the web they wish to harness this power. Agile Circle is one such application so they ordered up this review to help spread the word.

What is Agile Circle?
It's a "highly interactive and productive knowledge sharing environment"; which in real terms means it's an online system that allows you and your friends/collegues to share documents, task-lists and co-ordinate projects from anywhere in the world. This sort of thing is very handy and I use them on a day-to-day basis. Therefore within the system you can write notes, to-do lists, message each other, assign items to a calandar (for reminders), upload files, discuss projects and generally keep track of everything...



Why are these online collaboration tools useful then?
The reason I use them on a daily basis is because you can manage projects remotely; which is excellent if you can't be around your team all of the time. It's not uncommon for people to work together on projects without having even met (I've worked trans-atlantically with strangers in this way). Systems like these allow you to keep ontop of what could be quite a complicated situation. It's all about collaborative intelligence.

What you get when signing up for Agile Circle
It's pretty straight forward really; messages, forums, lists, to-do lists, messaging, chat, file management, etc. Everything you'd expect to be able to effectively manage projects remotely. Forums are pretty useful for threaded discussions - especially if you're just freely discussing solutions to known problems (something that simple messaging isn't great for). You can assign to-do lists and milestones to create a pseudo-timescale for projects; these notify the relevent user when the task needs actioning.

File uploads
This is one element that I feel Agile Circle manages rather well; when uploading documents you can create a virtual folder structure which allows for a much more logical setup. While Agile Circle shouldn't be treated as a document management system this is a great way of sharing any number of files with other team members remotely.

Don't be put off by the term "Project Management Tool"
Even though that's essentially what it is, it's actually a really useful system to allow you to co-ordinate anything. Got a designer doing a new design for your blog? Why not manage things a bit more effectively using a tool like this. You get my point.

Playing devil's advocate
On small scale projects you can simply use Google Documents to collaborate; which is pretty handy when they allow you to author the same documents at the same time. Sure it's not an advanced solution but it is free, and that leads me on to a big point about Agile Circle:

Pricing
Their pricing page explains that you can get a free 30 day trial (for 5 users) but after that it'll cost $29 a month. That's not a lot but that pricing scheme goes right up to $199 a month for 50 users, 5gb of disk space and all the features. There are packages inbetween (obviously) but it's on pricing that I find the biggest problem with Agile Circle - and yet again it's those boffins at 37signals.

Basecamp
This is the product I've been using on a daily basis for project management needs and it actually becomes Agile Circle's biggest foe; the functionality on offer overlaps an awful lot and that's not the only problem. The flagship Basecamp package is $149 a month and offers you 50gb of storage, unlimited projects but it doesn't end there. Their free (and that's 100% free) package doesn't appear to limit the number of users you can have and it's not limited to 30-days either; the only constraint is that you can't upload files and you can't have more than 1 active project.

Even the entry level Basecamp package is only $12 a month and allows 3 projects and 1gb of files, whereas the entry level Agile Circle offering only allows 100mb of space, 5 users and is more than double the price.

So is Agile Circle still worthwhile?
Absolutely, but you need to work out what you want from the tool. If you're likely to have numerous projects on the go at once but only a few users then Agile Circle is a decent choice - but you'd be wise to pay out for extra storage because 100mb won't go very far at all. Hell, most of the designs I work with are 30mb or more. Basecamp doesn't offer a file tree like AC does, but what use is that if you can't upload more than 100mb of files... I'm a little torn between the two.

I'm not going to recommend one over the other because I think it depends what your objectives are. I've been working with Basecamp happily for over 12 months now so I have a biased opinion. AC is a nice product so the best advice I can give is to sign up and give the 30 day trial a go and see if it fits your needs.

Criticsms
The layout is fine and I don't have any problem with the way the website has been built (from a web developer's point of view) but the colours are a little much. The background is quite a bright yellow, the navigation blue and green, the logo maroon and blue, the admin menu green and maroon, the announcements orange... There are just too many colours that don't fit into a colour scheme here. Some time spent on Kuler would really help. Other than that it's okay. It lacks the flair of 37signal's Basecamp which utilises Ajax wherever possible which makes for a much cleaner interface and user experience (in my opinion). The design for the entire website doesn't do the product justice; it looks a little basic and lacking structure and that isn't good for a project management tool. The functionality is fine though.

Interested? Here are some links
On their homepage there's a nice video explaining what AC is. Have a look at the pricing setup. Out of respect for Agile Circle who paid for this review, I won't be linking to the competing product. Go visit Agile Circle.

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